by medicaltechont | Mar 15, 2014 | emr, private clinics
TORONTO — Ontario’s Liberal government is putting community hospitals and medicare at risk with a plan to turn a wide range of services over to private clinics that will extra bill patients, a health care advocacy group warned Monday. The Ontario Health Coalition said taking such things as diagnostic services, physiotherapy and operations like cataract surgeries out of hospitals and having them provided by private clinics is a direct threat to publicly-funded medicare.
“This is a giant step towards American-style private health care, there’s no question,” said coalition executive director Natalie Mehra. “Virtually all of the private clinics that exist in Canada bill the public health system and they charge extra user fees too. That’s illegal under the Canada Health Act, but that’s routine in the private clinics.” Patients going to private clinics in Ontario can be billed up to $1,300 in extra fees for cataract surgery, while people looking for endoscopies or colonoscopies face fees of $80 to $200 above what’s billed to OHIP, said Mehra.
“These are services patients have paid for already through our taxes, and the private clinics are bringing in two-tier health care,” she said. “The Ministry of Health has turned a blind eye to these charges, and is now expanding the private clinic sector.” Health Minister Deb Matthews was unavailable for comment Monday, but her office said the government was committed to “move more routine, low-risk procedures into the community” through non-profit clinics.
Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/ontario-patient-group-seeks-to-stop-shift-of-some-services-to-private-sector-1.1722323#ixzz2w2mluJp0
by medicaltechont | Mar 15, 2014 | eHealth, EHR, Software
A Fredericton doctor says the province’s new electronic medical records system has created an uneven playing field.
Dr. Doug Varty was one of about 60 doctors who adopted electronic records before the new system was introduced.
He says he is out tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of work because the Department of Health and the New Brunswick Medical Society went with a program that no one was using.
In addition, Varty won’t be able to link to the provincial system, he said.
“That’s a very important part of any EMR is being able to download your data — you know, your lab reports, your X-ray reports, consultant reports and all those sorts of things, automatically, and in a timely fashion. And we’re being denied that,” Varty said.
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by medicaltechont | Oct 25, 2013 | emr, Technology
Ninety-six per cent of Canadians think it’s important that the health care system make use of digital health tools and capabilities, and 89 per cent feel it is important that they personally have full advantage of digital health tools and capabilities, according to a new survey by Harris/Decima, released by Canada Health Infoway (Infoway).
Other key findings from the Harris/Decima report include:
86 per cent of Canadians agree that digital health will provide health information to a care team in an emergency situation
86 per cent of Canadians believe it is important that their doctors use electronic medical records
90 per cent of Canadians who access their own health information online describe the experience as positive
Every day, more of Canada’s health care system goes digital. It’s a private, secure and effective way to make health care better, for all of us. Today, patients like Alexa Thompson use digital health to help manage their care and wellness.
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by medicaltechont | Sep 22, 2012 | Canada, e-Health, emr, Software, Technology
TORONTO – The Ontario government has spent nine years and billions of dollars trying to make its troubled eHealth program work.
And despite repeated assurances from the government, that progress is being made, many doctors still struggle to get timely access to basic medical records and patients continue to face needless risks and treatment delays the program has failed to deliver what the public was promised – efficient access to electronic health records.
One Burlington family doctor became so frustrated, he hired college students to see if they could help him fix the electronic mess the government left in his office.
They did.
He was able to easily and inexpensively turn unfriendly electronic patient information programs into a helpful tool he can actually use when sitting in front of a patient.
But Dr. John Holmes said that while one eHealth Ontario official showed up at his office to see what he’d done, the organization clearly wasn’t interested in learning from his experience.
As a frontline health care provider and as a taxpayer, that indifference doesn’t sit well with Holmes.
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by medicaltechont | Feb 16, 2010 | Ontario, Software
The federal government’s failure to release $500 million in promised funding has slowed the next phase of the multibillion-dollar national effort to implement electronic health records (EHRs), says Canada Health Infoway President Richard Alvarez.
The year-long freeze on federal funding has compromised plans to rollout initiatives designed to improve physician uptake of electronic records, Alvarez says. This will do nothing to improve Canada’s status as an international EHR laggard, Alvarez says.
“The next very serious phase is basically in community physicians’ offices,” says Alvarez, head of the federal agency created in 2001 to promote provincial and territorial EHR programs. “The vast majority of the [new] money was earmarked for that. That’s an absolutely crucial step in this journey. We’ve been slowed down. If we don’t have money to invest in that area we obviously can’t do that until such time as the money is reinstated.”
The $500 million was promised in the 2009 federal budget, raising the government’s overall electronic health records investment to $2.1 billion. Since 2001, Ottawa has now paid $1.6-billion for an array of programs in which federal funds have been matched by provincial and territorial monies to build nationally compatible systems and platforms. Alvarez estimates that about $3 billion has been invested to date by various levels of government in the development of EHRs in Canada.
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